Sojung Bahng (방소정) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and researcher. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, with a cross-appointment to the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University in Canada. Her work explores cinematic media through digital technologies, reflecting on aesthetic and narrative experiences within cultural and philosophical contexts. Sojung holds a PhD from SensiLab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia. Her doctoral thesis, Cinematic VR as a Reflexive Tool Beyond Empathy, received the 2020 Mollie Holman Medal for the best thesis of the year. She also served as a postdoctoral fellow and contract instructor in the Media Production and Design program at Carleton University in Canada. She earned her master’s degree in Culture Technology from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and a BFA in TV & Film Production and Art Theory from Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts, 한국예술종합학교).
Sojung’s works have been showcased and recognized at numerous prestigious festivals and symposiums worldwide. Her animated VR films have received international recognition, with Wired winning Second Prize in the VR Section at Digital Arts Zurich and Anonymous being exhibited at BIAF (Bucheon), TSFM (Torino), TIAF (Tbilisi), and ANIMAZE (Montreal). Her interactive VR project Sleeping Eyes received the Award of Excellence in Experience Design at the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories. The 360° autobiographical documentary Floating Walk was nominated for the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA) in Los Angeles, and her dance film Poetry of Separation was selected for NDC in New York. Her experiments in expanded cinema, performance, and digital storytelling have been presented at international venues and conferences including the McCord Stewart Museum (Montreal), Heide Museum (Melbourne), Arts and Technology (Istanbul), ICLC (Barcelona), ICMC (New York), and ISEA (Dubai and Brisbane). She also curated and directed Somplexity, a multidisciplinary art project funded by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles as first author in internationally recognized conferences and journals such as SIGCHI, ISEA, ArtsIT, HCII, TEI, ICIDS, Frontiers, and ACM Interactions. She is currently running researchpractice, a collaborative framework exploring intersections between research and practice, and leading an SSHRC-funded research project titled Meta-Metaverse: Digital Art-Based Research on Reflective Approaches to the Metaverse.
Artist website: sojungb.com
researchpractice website: research-practice.com